This disclosure relates to a method for copy protection of defined areas out of their context within the electronic publication and/or document. With the fast development of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its comprehensive application, the integrity protection of electronic documents is becoming pressing. Integrity means that a composite portion of the electronic document includes its context, designation of authorship and an indication of source.
In the art, common and/or proprietary document formats (PDF) are used that prevent the user from cut and copy operations. In such documents a reuse of parts of the document is not possible. Alternatively common and/or proprietary document formats (PDF) are used that allow the user to perform cut and copy operations without limitations. In such documents easy falsification and misuse of information is possible. As an example, by pretending its originality a part of a statement of a politician can be communicated in a different context than originally stated.
In the Patent Application Publication US 2008/0288862 A1 “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IN-DOCUMENT MARKUP IN SUPPORT OF INFORMATION SHARING” by Smetters et al. a method and system are provided that facilitate content dissemination. During operation, the system allows a user to add a tag to a first document, wherein the tag indicates an operation to be performed on a portion of the document. The system then processes the tag and performs the operation on the document portion based on the tag. The tag can specify one or more of an action, the portion of the document, and a receiving entity corresponding to the action. Further the action can comprise one or more of a showing of, sharing of, copying of, request of comment for, and a request of approval for the document portion with respect to the receiving entity. The document portion may include a paragraph, a section, and/or a specific text location. The receiving entity can be identified by at least one of: one or more user identifiers, one or more group identifiers, one or more email addresses, one or more network addresses, and one or more pathnames. Additionally the operation may include sending the content portion to a second user. The system further receives a second document or document portion in response to the operation performed and modifies the first document based on the second document or document portion. Also the system may receive a user command which triggers the processing of the tag. The processing of the tag may be triggered based on one or more events. Further performing the operation on the document portion can involve encrypting a copy of the document portion and sending the encrypted copy to the receiving entity, and authenticating a copy of the document portion by signing the copy with a digital signature and sending the authenticated copy to the receiving entity.
The described method and system define a document portion for sharing but do not secure this shared portion from extracting parts of it out of the context by the receiver.